Controls and other interface elements.
Oct 28 2017
The other day I had what I thought a very simple request: I wanted to replace one viewcontroller with another in the same window. This is something that on iOS (particularly iPhones) happens all the time; but somewhat to my suprise, macOS does not have an obvious out-of-the-box solution for this. This turns out to […]
Jul 16 2017
Xcode 9b/Swift 4/macOS 10.12 (This tutorial has been updated and tested under Xcode 9 since the previous instructions no longer worked to create new projects, which is exactly the same problem I had going from 7 to 8/10.10 to 10.11. I currently have one project that will compile and run under Xcode 8, but crash […]
Jun 25 2017
MacOS 10.12.5; Xcode 9b. I’m filing this under the ‘bug reports’ tag though I think it falls under ‘expected behaviour’, but this is a bit of a knotty problem. I had an app with a notecard, which has a title (NSTextField) and a body (NSTextView). I wanted the title to be first responder. Sadly, my […]
Jun 22 2017
This is an IB bug that, well, bugs me: If you add a portrait image to your asset catalogue and use it in an NSImageView, it gets rotated. The preview is fine, it’s fine if you add it to your project otherwise or load it from file; but from an asset catalogue, it fails.
Jan 15 2017
Xcode 8, macOS 10.12, Swift 3.0 In Part 1 of this tutorial, we created an outlineView that, thanks to a SourceListItem protocol, was indefinitely flexible: you can have different classes on several levels, or indefinite levels (though it is probably wise to limit this programatically so you don’t nest too deep. It all depends on […]
Jan 12 2017
macOS 10.12, Xcode 8.0, Swift 3 Storyboard segues make it exceedingly easy to create popovers, but sometimes you want to customise your popovers a bit more, for instance make windows detachable. When building interfaces the old-fashioned way with xib files or in code, you would use the NSPopoverDelegate protocol and wire things up appropriately. Storyboards […]
Jan 10 2017
OSX 10.12, Xcode 8.0 I’m not entirely certain under which circumstances this is useful, but [code language=”plain”]class invisibleWindowController: NSWindowController { override func windowDidLoad() { super.windowDidLoad() self.window?.isOpaque = false self.window?.backgroundColor = NSColor.clear } }[/code] is a thing of beauty. If the view in the window’s contentViewController overrides override func draw(_ dirtyRect: NSRect), the effect is […]
Dec 30 2016
(macOS 10.11; Xcode 8.0) This post deals with colouring buttons. Some of the techniques described are against Apple’s InterfaceDesign guidelines; others are simply against the rules of good taste. This post is an exploration of what is possible and will provide a handy reference in the future if I ever think ‘oh, I wish I […]
Nov 9 2017
NSAlert Tutorial
macOS 10.12, Xcode 9, Swift 4 In my post on macOS Storyboard Segues I said I’d look at sheets in more details, and now is as good a time as any. I meant to look at sheet segues in this post, but then I worked through all of the permutations of NSAlert, and 3500 words […]
By Extelligent Cocoa • Application Design, Interface, Tutorials • • Tags: NSAlert, NSApplication.ModalResponse, sheets, UserDefaults